Hermes and the Tortoise by Ezra Sandzer-Bell Alchemical philosophy describes the art of physical and spiritual transformation

by a series of numbered stages, beginning with an embrace of Dark Matter toward the attainment of Perfect Light. It has been written that no transformation could be achieved without access to an elusive substance called the Philosophers Stone. Carl Jung writes in his groundbreaking book Psychology and Alchemy that the true identity of this stone was none other than Lapis Lazuli, a deep blue gemstone ruled by the power of Hermes, whose inner nature corresponds to the planet Mercury. For this reason, this character plays a vital role in the alchemical opus, appearing frequently as the link between Human and Divine realms of existence. Hermes carries a magical weapon called the caduceus, a symbol that remains present in our world today as an emblem of the medical industry, for its capacity to heal and to destroy all things. The concept of a magical staff carries over into other spheres of western culture, particularly the world of Music, where the word staff has a double meaning; Firstly, as the name of that horizontal five-lined canvass upon which all sheet music is written, as well as the hidden name of the conductors wand. The purpose of this essay is to introduce some examples of the significant influence of Hermes-Mercury and alchemical philosophy on the Western Musical canon.

Students of Western esotericism know that Hermes was a hermaphroditic god, partaking in both masculine and feminine aspects. The alchemists insistence upon the androgynous nature of this deity reveals their preference for non-dual perspectives of reality, akin to the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. We are led to understand that the philosophers stone contains both positive and negative charge, like an electric battery, and it is with this power-source that the alchemical operations take place. Each of the seven classical planets of astrology is attributed to a phase of the alchemical process. They are arranged as three pairs of planets, Sun/Moon : Mars/Venus : Jupiter/Saturn, with Mercury as the odd one out. The logic of these pairings becomes self-evident as we consider their position in orbit around the sun. Mars and Venus, the two heliocentric planets adjacent to Earth, signify masculine and feminine qualities of our Inner Eye. The polarity of Sun and Moon also hold masculine and feminine properties, but have more to do with the psychological concepts of Consciousness and Sub-Consciousness. Visible to the naked eye, the Sun and Moon are granted additional attributions to the passage of time on earth, including daily, lunar, seasonal, and annual cycles. Due perhaps to the patriarchal bias of classical Western thought, Jupiter and Saturn both correspond to male gods in the Greek and European alchemical texts, signifying positive and negative aspects of the Father archetype. The double-masculine attribution of this pair is not emphasized in all of the western mysteries however. In Jewish mysticism, Saturn is positioned at the sphere of Binah on the Tree of Life, a world whose attribution signifies the highest expression of the divine feminine. The disagreements in gender-attribution are due partly to the different cultures to which they belong. In both instances, Saturn signifies something dark in contrast to the light of Jupiter. Saturn and Jupiter were the most far-out planets accounted for by the seven-planet system, though Greek astronomers were aware of Neptune and Uranus as well. Of the seven planets, these three planetary pairs exclude Mercury, which appears at first glance to be without a partner. Yet we know that the planets godform Hermes is an androgynous character. Like the serpent swallowing its own tail, Mercury contains both beginning and ending within itself. Within the planetary scheme, Mercury could be compared to the opposable thumb, an indispensable organ of human individuation and power. This noble planet, our Stone of the Wise, allows us to grasp the outside world. Alchemical emblems frequently depict Hermes-mercury accompanied by a magical weapon, the caduceus wand, a pair of serpents coiling upward along the axis of an upright staff, approaching what in many cases appears to be a winged, solar disc. The resolution of feminine serpent energy and the masculine rod reiterates the principle of nonduality, by which Hermes healed the sick and aided in the transmutation of Lead into Gold. Take note that the Christian lineage of alchemy draws a parallel between Christ and Hermes-Mercury as the saviors of mankind.

Hermetic principles have informed the secret philosophies of many elite Greek, Islamic, and Christian societies through the ages. We find in Platonic texts the idea of a harmony of the spheres, dealing on the surface with ratios of spatial distance between planetary bodies, while signifying a deeper cosmological unity, a creative principle from which all things emerge and return. Governing this astrological harmony of the spheres was a mythic cast of characters called the Muses, from whom we derive the word Music. They belonged to an invisible realm and were said to inspire human creativity, each ruling a unique form of expressions on the sensual level of human expression. Plato wrote about the music of the spheres as a gift from the gods, whereby each planet in orbit produced its own musical tone, like a finger circulating the rim of a glass of water, and that the consonance of our planetary system resembled a symphony of balanced sounds. Of course, there was no such thing as symphonic music at the time, so we can only wonder what type if internal musical experiences were available to human imagination at that time.

Greek concepts of astrological harmony were suppressed by the monotheism of Roman Christianity, yet it seems as though religious fascination with these ideas never fully disappeared. Perhaps they simply went underground, into the secret libraries of the high priests. For nearly a thousand years (6th-15th century) monophonic chants were developed in Christian monasteries as a method of prayer and communion with the Divine. The gradual emergence of European aristocracy and High Art led to growing demands for secular music, and the classical period of music with which we are all familiar arrived on the scene as a firm departure from its roots in the common practice period of church music, where the laws of harmonic and melodic gravity had been slowly gestating. J.S. Bach has been officially dubbed the Grandfather of Western Music, though he was merely the capstone of a lineage of common-practice composers. He wrote music for the church during the early-mid 18th century, followed shortly thereafter by Mozart in the mid-late 18th century, who in contrast to Bach, participated publically in Freemasonic culture and authored a number of compositions dedicated to the Craft, including pieces such as The Little Masonic Cantata, Masonic Funeral Music, and Die Maurerfreude (The Masons Joy). In both J.S. Bach and Mozart, along with all of the Western music that followed, we find some core harmonic principles that do not change, despite dramatic shifts in expressive style. An alchemicalastrological philosophy of a harmony of the spheres can be detected to those with eyes to see. There is virtually no literature on this peculiar topic, with the exception of a few texts published by the European university professor and author, Joscelyn Godwin. Even his texts are so thoroughly academic that they miss some of the broad-stroke observations about the influence of Western esotericism on Western music. If we take Bach and Mozart as mile markers in the development of western music, and the role of occult philosophies in their music, we must begin first with the obvious commonalities. They both made frequent use of the Grand Piano as the primary composition tool. They also relied upon nearly identical methods of musical notation. In the following segment I will attempt to illustrate the influence of alchemical and astrological thought on the language and symbolism present in music today. The philosophers stone, as stated earlier, was attributed to Mercury-Hermes and the Lapis Lazuli, a gem commonly referred to as the water stone of the wise. Their concept of a liquid stone presents an immediate paradox, yet its musical meaning can be decoded through simple wordplay by applying an anagram of the word Stone into the words Tones and Notes. In fact, the basic premise of the pianos design was that musical tones, a technical term signifying the aural acoustic phenomenon of sound vibration, could be turned to stone via projection of round stone-like shapes onto staff paper. The magical-musical staff (of Hermes) turned these stones into quantifiable objects, what we call musical notes. Anagrams are a common device in alchemical texts. Jewish and Greek mysticism both involved an elaborative contemplative practice around the application of anagrams to religious texts. The word for this technique is Gematria. Every letter of the Greek and Hebrew alphabet has a corresponding numerical value. In fact, the alphabet and numerical system used to be composed of the same glyphs, until the introduction of the Arabic numerals many centuries later. In the art of gematria, the order of letters will generate new words, but these new words nevertheless add up to an identical number. This is the basic principle of arithmetic, that 7+4 = 4+7 and so in gematria, G+D = D+G. Again, the fixed letters of the word stone were rendered mutable by means of gematria, invoking the serpent power of Mercury to create two new words, Tones and Notes, whose new meanings corresponded to a polarity of Movement and Concretism. Recall the caduceus rod of Hermes with its twin serpents.

Next, we will consider the layout of a piano because of its importance as the master instrument for baroque music composition, and also because of its connection to the Hermetic principle of Mercurial orbit. A standard grand piano consists of 88 keys. Our planet mercury requires 88 days to complete its orbital path around the sun. Coincidence?

The piano is divided into sets of white and black keys. These sets follow a twelve-note pattern, consisting of seven white keys and five black keys, an noteworthy asymmetry resonating with the Christian preference for light over darkness, along with the attribution of seven planetary bodies to the heavenly sphere of Light and five elements to the darkened sphere of Earth. When seven and five come together, we arrive at the number twelve, a classical signifier of the Sun. Mercury is the closest planet to the sun and in its most secret attribution may be viewed as the Moon of the Sun. There are twelve months in a solar year, in contrast to the thirteen moons of a lunar year. We find twelve houses in the solar zodiac, twelve apostles around the solar Christ figure, twelve tribes of Israel, and so forth. When we consider that Western Music emerged from esoteric Christian philosophy, it should come as no surprise that its foundation would express a predominantly solar number-archetype. These dozen tones are echoed in the theoretical foundation of our color wheel, with its three primary, three secondary, and six tertiary colors.

The tones produced by the piano are notated on staff paper, classically arranged into upper and lower parts called Treble and Bass clefs. Again, the word staff invokes the image of the caduceus, the hermetic magical weapon of transformation. Ascending and descending melodies resemble the curving body of the serpents, and the two clefs are separated by an invisible yet functional middle ledger-line called Middle-C. This central note is positioned at the center of the piano keyboard. Plenty of significance could be projected onto the existence of this Middle-C note. It resonates with the idea of a central pillar, a common theme in Masonic and synchromystic symbolism. As the third letter of the alphabet, the letter C signifies the center between two pre-existing polarities, such as the letters A and B or the Treble and Bass clefs. In Latin, the morpheme cor implies the sun, from which the word corona (halo of light) and corazon (heart) emerged. As the center of system, the Middle-C functions as the Central Channel of the Staff. Like Christ Consciousness, the middle C note orients the rest of the grand staff by means of a fixed position on the piano. Furthermore, the Latin word for this musical staff was pentagramma, translating roughly to English as five-lettered. It goes without saying that pentagrams have a deeply magical significance, used most commonly for protection during evocation. Given the enormous psychological influence of music during its formative years, when the average listener was far less desensitized and conditioned to accept the potential dissonance of sound, it may have been deemed necessary to harness the power of the pentagram when invoking musical spirits.

One of the ancient masterpieces of Greek literature, the Homeric epics, depicts an encounter between Hermes and Apollo. The latter was the son of Zeus, a god of Light who specialized in music. In this story, Hermes discovers a mountain tortoise, tears its belly from the shell, scoops away the inner body and steals away with the half-shell in his possession. Next, drawing the intestinal organs from a sacred cow, Hermes fashions a set of gut-strings and attached them to the hollow turtle shell, fashioning a brand new instrument that the Greeks called the lyre. Apollo is disgusted by Hermes offering at first, but upon hearing the wonderful sounds produced by it, becomes spellbound and forgives Hermes sins, if only he may be allowed to possess it. While were on the topic of turtles and creation myths, lets transcend our limited scope of western philosophy with a non-linear leap toward the mythogenesis of the I Ching. It is said that the I Ching was discovered by Emperor Fu-Xi as he contemplated the shell of a tortoise. Turtle shells literally resonate, so it is no surprise that musical resonance and philosophical psychic resonance have both been attributed to this noble water-creature. The I Ching consists of sixty-four hexagrams, the product of 8x8 trigrams. Here again we locate a variation on the Hermes-Mercury 88 theme.

A trigram is composed of three lines, labeled either broken or unbroken. Broken lines signify a feminine quality and unbroken lines signify a masculine quality. Something interesting happens when we consider these broken and unbroken lines as intervals. By interval we mean the space between two objects, and in this case, the intervals do not refer to any forms found in the I Ching, but rather to the spatial intervals found in the chordal harmonies of Western Music. A chord is defined simply by the presence of three or more notes played simultaneously. These notes must be different from one another; otherwise they would be the same note. Therefore, it would be correct to say that the simplest type of chord consists of only three notes.

There are two fundamental chord types in western music. They are called major and minor chords. The major chord is typically associated with joy while the minor chord expresses sorrow. In alchemical terms, the major chord corresponds to the solar-masculine and the minor chord to the lunar-feminine. These chords are triadic, which is to say that they consist of three notes.

There are four primary combinations of musical triads. As you can see, the interval relations in our Western musical chord system deals with polarities of major and minor, a direct correlation to the interval system of the I Ching, which deals with broken and unbroken lines. The trigrams of the I Ching can be said to correspond to the eight chords that would result from all possible combinations of four-note, tripleinterval chords. If we were adventurous, we could also explore the rhythmic division of the whole note into eighth notes, where the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching would be made to correspond to the 64 spaces on a chess board, which consists of black and white squares, corresponding to the strong and weak rhythmic beats of an eighth-note pulse. This unfortunately does not correspond as effectively as the harmonic analogy, so we wont take much time exploring that rabbit hole. In the race between tortoise and the hare, turtle power reigns supreme. To summarize, our Hermes-Mercury tortoise, a creature of the water whose shell resembles a stone, upon which we discover the code to both I Ching and western musical chord formulae, functions in real life as a fantastic resonant chamber, so harmonically potent that even Apollo could not resist its charm.

The binary-triplets discovered along our hermetic journey through the underworld reveals no quantifiable reason for emotional effectiveness of Music. Why does a song evoke the feelings and thoughts that it does? Perhaps the answer to this question will always remain a mystery. However, we have discovered a new philosophical purpose for the empty shells (qlipoth) of harmonic polarity in Western Music theory. We come out the other side understanding non-duality in musical terms, where duality is an empty resonant chamber upon which the music of the spheres must be played. Without the music of the heart, Mental-Mercurial polarity systems remain a dead thing, frustratingly predictable and highly mechanistic. The foundation of Western music transcends genre and carries with it a riddle of the heart, where unity of mind and guts in the medium of our physical body, the true philosophers stone, composed primarily of water, the lapis lazuli, the elixir of life and ultimate transmutative medium, allows the songwriter to draw music down from the harmony of the spheres into the mundane spheres of human existence for all to enjoy. Sealed in stone by virtue of Mercurys musical staff, songs are granted nearly eternal life in the timeless accessibility of sheet music and instrumental performance, and so it is that the ancient mystical philosophy of Pythagoras enjoys a vital existence to this very day, hidden in plain sight for all to see.

Ezra Sandzer-Bell has been participating in the synchromystic community since 2007. In 2008 he appeared on Red Ice Creations to discuss his Hidden Origins of Western Music(k) essays. He went on to create a series of collaborative videos with Steve Willner (Labyrinth of the Psychonaut) and appeared on a number of internet radio podcasts. In 2009 he launched the Tone Color Alchemy Project, a group study course geared toward a study of the link between Kabbalah, Tarot, and Music Theory, inspired by the Golden Dawn lineage of Paul Foster Case and the B.O.T.A. He currently works as a nutritional consultant and herbal-medicine bartender at a natural foods store in Los Angeles, teaching harmonic theory and writing original music compositions on the side. http://www.tonecoloralchemy.com http://www.ezrazebra.com Email: Tonecoloralchemy@gmail.com